In the interest of making progress, it might be useful to split ISSUE-12 into two.
There seems to be good consensus on what we want to do about strings without language tags. There seems to be disagreement on what we want to do about language-tagged strings.
So here's a proposal that *only* addresses untagged strings. If we can agree on this, then it will simplify the other half of the discussion.
1. Abolish plain literals *without language tag* from the abstract syntax
2. "foo" and corresponding forms in other concrete syntaxes are syntactic sugar for "foo"^^xsd:string. In general, both forms MAY be used and are equivalent.
3. N-Triples has use cases that are hampered by the variability introduced by syntactic sugar. One of the two forms is forbidden when serializing. Only when serializing, so that legacy documents can still be parsed. The N-Triples editors will take care of this.
4. This proposal does not consider what ought to be done about language-tagged strings or rdf:PlainLiteral; these questions are to be addressed in a separate proposal and decision
This is on the wiki here, including some notes on effects on SPARQL and a handy table that summarizes the changes:
http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/StringLiterals/AbolishUntaggedPlain
Maybe we can put this to the vote on Wednesday and at least chop one head off this beast?
Richard